It has been some time since you last heard from us. Rest assured that we have been working hard on the project and have made significant headway. If you followed the progress bars, you'll notice that they have been updated today, increasing by at least 8 percentage points in each category (with the tiny exception of mapping). To showcase some of this progress and to reward you for your patient wait on this mod, we will be offering you a Christmas gift:

The new demo will showcase the town of Elko, i.e. the first location of the game. You might ask why we would release the same stuff we released over 4 years ago. The main reason is that Mutants Rising has evolved greatly since then and the only "stuff" that remained from the original Elko are the general lines of the story. We could say that Elko 2007 was a draft, while Elko 2011 is the fully implemented, frozen location of the final product, with cutscenes, fully voiced and animated talking heads as well as blackjack and hookers (in fact, forget the blackjack and the hookers).

The demo also presents an opportunity to reveal some of the new game features we have implemented. First and foremost, we completely overhauled First Aid and Doctor skills. Each time your character receives a critical hit, you suffer a bleeding wound. For each such wound, you lose 1 Hit Point every 10 seconds. In order to heal these wounds, you can either use drugs, or apply your First Aid skill. Using First Aid also increases your Healing Rate. It does NOT restore your lost Hit Points though. The Doctor skill on the other hand, is still used as a means to heal crippling injuries, but it also enables you to restore Hit Points. The effects of both skills depend on your skill level - the higher the skill, the greater the bonuses. Moreover, the HP bonus from using Doctor is increased by your Healing Rate, so it's convenient to apply First Aid before using the Doctor skill. This was our attempt at making both abilities more useful, and preliminary tests showed that it does add a challenge and forces you to boost these skills or spend a fortune on drugs. Another prominent modification was done to the character traits. We have replaced many useless traits from the original with new ones, and modified or tweaked the remaining ones, increasing the number of valid choices. There are also many other tweaks such as decreased ammo counts, decreased Carry Weight, etc.